Don't Miss This Chance To Clean Up Lake Apopka

November 28, 1987|By George Stuart, Jr.

The state Cabinet has a historic opportunity to clean up Lake Apopka, the state's dirtiest lake. Take advantage of it.

That opportunity involves a swap of 3,700 acres of state-owned land in the Everglades Agricultural Area for 5,000 acres of privately owned, mucky farmland on the northern edge of Lake Apopka. The proposed swap not only would clean up Lake Apopka, but do so without sacrificing the goals of protecting Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades.

A Sentinel editorial Nov. 13 headlined, ''Planning before swapping,'' concluded that it the swap is premature, and that the state should study how the lands might be used in an overall plan to address pollution problems in the Lake Okeechobee-Everglades system.

I disagree.

First, consider what the swap would do for Lake Apopka and its chain of lakes. It would:

-- Immediately eliminate an estimated 6.2 billion gallons of polluted water flowing into the the lake.

-- Restore vegetation around the shoreline, which would allow fish and animals to breed around the lake.

What about potential negative impacts from the swap on the Okeechobee- Everglades area?

Clearly Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades are facing problems from nutrients that pollute the water. The Legislature has recognized this complex issue by establishing this system as a priority under the Surface Water Improvement and Management (SWIM) plan.

Some people fear that swapping the land on Lake Apopka for the state- owned acreage would reduce the options for cleaning up polluted discharge water in the Everglades.

But more than 60,000 of the state-owned 93,000 acres in the Everglades Agricultural Area already are earmarked for restoration efforts. The 3,700- acre parcel in the swap represents less than 1 percent of the total lands farmed in the Everglades.

It seems unlikely that the continued agricultural use of less than 1 percent of this area could seriously limit the options available to deal with Okeechobee-Everglades problems once the studies by scientists are done.

It is the nutrient-laden waters from these farms that is creating the problems in the Everglades.

If A. Duda & Sons obtain this property, they have agreed to provide on- site retention for their agricultural water, holding it until most of the nutrients settle out. This would set a tremendous precedent to be followed by other farming operations within the Everglades Agricultural Area. It would require those who benefit from use of these lands to bear the cost of providing for water retention without using state-owned lands.

People have been talking about cleaning up Lake Apopka for years. Now the Cabinet has a chance to turn talk into action.